News Issue No. 7 Spring 1999

Michael Kitson Address at Memorial Service

St Clement Danes,
23 October 1998

A class with Michael Kitson always began a little late. Michael would enter
the room, smiling, in a state of apparent exhaustion, but with just a tinge
of frenzy. After a certain initial bustling around, redeploying, but never,
I suspect, re-organising, the many papers on the table, he would settle
down in his chair, invite you to start reading your essay, light a cigarette
and fall sound asleep.

The minutes that ensued were ones of mounting tension, as the unsmoked cigarette
burned slowly down towards the slumbering fingers, and all wondered if Michael
was hearing a word you were saying. But always - and when preparing for
this morning I discovered it was the abiding mystery about Michael for all
of us who were taught by him - always, just as you finished, just before
the flesh began to singe, the eyes would open, and the comments and the
questions made it clear that Michael had if not heard, then perfectly intuited,
your observations. Then - for he was a great teacher - he contrived to do
two things: to make you feel you had begun to understand something very
important, and to make you gently aware that you had only begun and you
should go and think about it much more closely. The encouragement would
be sustained over the following months and years, as the Professor turned
into the colleague, and Michael the teacher became Michael the friend. This
was also a universal experience, and one that could be attested by former
students in museums and universities all round the world.

As is clear, I knew Michael not in the context of his family, but in the
world of his professional life - at that stage the Courtauld Institute,
later the Mellon Centre and Yale. And in that world, it has long been part
of conventional wisdom that Michael Kitson was a phenomenon doubly rare:
rare as the outstanding scholar critic of his generation, perhaps indeed
of this century, who could explore a great work of art and never forget
it was a great work of art. Rarer still - for we are a world notorious for
our divisions and acerbities - he was a man not just respected but loved.
For all - of whatever faction - were struck and disarmed by that unfailing
courtesy of manner and that seemingly inexhaustible generosity of spirit.
They are words one would want to use at any memorial service. We, all of
us, know that this morning they can be spoken in truth.

It was no doubt in part Michaels extraordinary range of interests
- the bibliography now being compiled by the Mellon Centre shows him regularly
writing over thirty years on topics from the Renaissance to the end of the
nineteenth century - that enabled him to win affection and find common ground
with people of such diverse convictions. Art historians new or old, attributionists
and Marxists, those beguiled by taxonomy or dallying with Lacan, all found
it easy and enjoyable to work with Michael, and the Mellon Centre, in particular,
benefited much from his capacity to bring disparate groups together in harmony.
At times, this range of sympathy could appear ingenuous, almost naïve,
but I believe it was the fruit of a profound moral discipline and continuous
effort, although I would never have dared tell Michael that. Like George
Herberts seventeenth-century Country Parson, confronting those in
his Parish that held strange doctrines, Michael would 'make a very
loving and sweet usage of them, both in going to and sending for them often,
and in finding out courtesies to place on them  being himself
always 'unmoved in arguing and void of all contentiousness. In
Michaels conception of the art-historical church, everybody had
a place.

It may be that this wide, accepting sympathy came naturally and without
effort. What is certain is that the writing did not. If working with Michael
as a student was pleasure unalloyed, it must be said at once that working
with him as an editor was quite another proposition. Rarely can there have
been so deep a disjunction between the serene lucidity of the finished prose
and the sustained anguish, illuminated by flashes of panic, which attended
its making. Deadlines would pass with apologies but never - honourably never
- with excuses. The long nights of smoking and writing at the Mellon Centre
would get longer and later. Misfortunes befell - the entire first version
of the Claude entry for the Macmillan Dictionary of Art vanished irrecoverably
into the Lethe of Cyber-Limbo at the careless pressing of a delete key -
and round-the-clock support teams were necessary to ensure the delivery
of the review of the Royal Academy Poussin exhibition. In the
end, a text would arrive just in time - or nearly in time - manuscript
and impeccable, without a crossing-out, and of the quality we all know,
admire and envy. In Eliots happy formulation,

'The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise, but not pedantic,

Few of us at the Courtauld knew what we wanted to do when we left. But we
all knew we wanted to write like Michael Kitson.

Like all good critics, Michael produced an enormous number of scattered
pieces - some of the finest are his broadcasts, later published in The
Listener; and like all great critics, he had a position. Not an
ideological one - from that he always stood aside - but a conviction
that artists make art and that the critics task is to explain
why that art matters, how it moves and instructs, raises our spirits
and changes our lives.

'There is a danger, he wrote thirty years ago, 'that Caravaggios
real quality as an artist may get lost between, on the one hand, the
romance attaching to his name and on the other, the minute speculations
that have been heaped by scholars, often with little or no evidence,
round the attribution and exact dating of his works.

He goes on to what is, I think, the nearest he came to a formal statement
of his critical stance: 'Caravaggios is a compelling personality
and his personality is relevant to his art. To the scholar his work does
present baffling problems. But the key questions are: what did Caravaggio
succeed in achieving as a painter? And why is he one of the handful of
great Italian painters of the seventeenth century?

Few art-historians have the courage to ask such questions, and none has
been better able to answer them. Whichever the artist under discussion,
Michael would survey the documentary evidence, conjure rapidly the political
and intellectual worlds which shaped the artists life and the patrons
who might have affected his choices. He would set out, in short, the limits
of the knowable, and then he would turn to the central question - the act
of poetic creation itself, an act which could be studied, tracked, described,
but never fully understood. The effect of the work on us could be evoked.
Its importance for us could be insisted on, but, for Michael, at its heart
there remained - in the words of Henry Vaughan - 'a deep but dazzling
darkness. And this is, I think, why his writings will endure.

I must, of course, finish with Claude - the artist he loved above all
others, and the artist whom we all see through his eyes. In the introduction
to the Hayward exhibition catalogue - one of the finest pieces ever written
on Claude - he set out his ideas on how the artist should be approached.
'The first quality necessary to the enjoyment of Claudes art
is patience. He is not a painter who offers instant sensations The
process of coming to terms with his work is one of careful adjustment, of
opening oneself to the harmonies in which he specialises it repays
the patience expended on it by lasting, by being, as Constable said of a
copy of Claude he was making 'something to drink at again and again.
It is vintage Kitson.

Perhaps only in this country could an intellect so inquiring and so elegant
fail to be honoured by either the British Academy or the Order of the British
Empire in any of their manifestations. And perhaps only a man so modest
as Michael would have minded so little.

For all of us, it matters now not at all. To read Michael Kitson is to be
reminded again and again why pictures are great things. To know him was
to experience the transforming power of generosity of spirit.